Hey CyberneticSusurrus! Kind of a wall of text down there, the tl;dr is you're right and these are great points and helps me to level up in writing this stuff. Thanks for making them! Feel free to read on if you want musings, but none of it is really that important.
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Point 1: I agree on 100%, and it's one of my regrets with the game. Ideally we'd have had more characters (we originally planned for 7!) and then maybe we could have had a non-alien nb. Or just had another human character. I really wanted alien dates though, haha :D >.< In our sensitivity reader's defense, it might have been brought up, but while we brought her on early enough to make big changes, it wasn't so early that we could have completely redesigned the character, so maybe it was one of those we (I) decided to live with. But yeah, it's not ideal, and I know the trope -- I just didn't realize it in time. Whomp whomp :( Maybe if I'd had my gender stuff figured out better back in 2018 I could have done it better, haha.
The game also has no ace or aro rep at all except for being able to self-id as ace :( Another regret. (Originally all ships were going to be romantic, and then we made the call to include gay characters, but only like 80% adjusted to that pivot. I didn't realize how much I would love the friend dates until I wrote them and there was no more time. So it goes.)
Point 2: Yeah, this is a tough one. I'm not sure I even thought about it, so that's a learning opportunity for me, definitely something I should have at least been consciously deciding rather than defaulting. There's certainly folks who identify as gay who are still into non-binary people, and I guess the in-world excuse is that both Zirconia and Riptide fall into that more open-ended self-identity. But IRL, yeah, I agree -- at least it should have been discussed more, or maybe it would've been better to have only one of the gay characters develop romantic feelings for Zael. Ah well. Something to keep in mind for next time.
Anyway, thanks for bringing these up, they're super helpful! Sorry for dropping the ball on them :D M:IC will enter the ranks of queer media that can't quite manage to shoulder the load of representing the whole spectrum equally and without flaws haha, like all the rest :> Until there's enough of it, that'll always be the case, and we just gotta keep trying and keep pointing this stuff out and trying better next time whoo!